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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrunkonDuty" data-source="post: 8181570" data-attributes="member: 54364">Re. HERO and GURPS and the line (if any) between them in terms of crunch.Up front I should say that I'm a big time HERO system fan, so assume I'm gonna show bias in its favour.Folks over on the HERO boards always say that HERO's complexity is "front loaded." That once you've done character design it plays pretty smoothly. In my experience that is broadly accurate. What it doesn't say is that that axiom applies to campaign settings too; even published ones. So say you want to play generic high fantasy adventures in the HERO published setting The Turakian Age. The GM still has a lot of prep work to do going such as choosing limits to attack, defence, damage, spell power, etc. Unlike a level based system where power level is hard coded into the game, in HERO the GM has to work that stuff out themselves.  And there's decidedly little guidance on how to go about doing that. A very frequent question posted on the HERO boards is "How do I tell what's too much/too little power?" But once that is all done the game plays very smoothly. It runs well because HERO runs on an algorithm. There's not much need to look things up in play.GURPS character design is more like picking  feats for DND/Pathfinder in that there's a list of things to choose from. The problem I find is that each feat/power/spell in the list more or less runs on it's own rule; this can lead to complex interactions between the various feats (and even between the feats and the broader rules.) That in turn can then lead to frequent looking up of rules during play which of course leads to slower play, possible inconsistent GM rulings, yada yada yada. So in conclusion: I think GURPS plays more easily than mid+ level DnD/Pathfinder, but HERO plays more easily than any of them. Character design is easier in GURPS because the player, especially a new player, can simply pick things from a list. Hell, most gamers of my acquaintance, me included, think that that's fun. Character design in HERO is harder as it requires an understanding of an algorithm that looks pretty damn impenetrable to a new player. Cheers.</blockquote>

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